Marcel Proust Quotations

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.

We always end up doing the thing we are second best at.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

There can be no piece of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent

It has been said that beauty brings a promise of happiness, but it could be otherwise that the possibility of joy is the beginning of beauty.

His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey.

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.